Steve O'Kane
CO-EDITOR, FIELD BOTANIST

Steve O'Kane is a lead field botanist and an editor for the San Juan Basin Flora Project. Steve will contribute botanical treatments of the Brassicaceae (Mustard Family), the Capparaceae (Caper Family) and the Crassulaceae (Stonecrop Family). He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Northern Iowa.

Steve obtained his B.S. in Range and Forest Management at Colorado State University in Ft. Collins, the M.S. in Botany at Colorado State University and the Ph.D. in Evolutionary and Population Biology at Washington University in St. Louis, where he worked under Peter Raven (Missouri Botanical Garden) and Barbara Schaal. Post-doctoral work was also conducted at the Missouri Botanical Garden where he worked with Ihsan Al-Shehbaz on the systematics of Arabidopsis and related genera (Mustard Family). Steve has a bit of a split personality! He spends his winters doing molecular research in the Mustard Family and his summers collecting for the San Juan Basin Flora Project.

Steve has been teaching courses in Systematic Botany, Ecology, and Biogeography at the University of Northern Iowa since 1996. In previous lives he was an Assistant Curator at the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Botanist and Inventory Coordinator with the Colorado Natural Areas Inventory and a co-instructor at University of Northern Colorado. Stints with the Bureau of Land Management (Colorado), the U.S. Forest Service (Colorado and Utah), and the Soil Conservation Service (Alaska) helped pay the school bills.

Steve has published many scientific papers, including ones on the rare plants of Colorado, new species of Penstemon, Lesquerella and Erigeron, a floristic inventory of the San Luis Valley, Colorado, and an inventory of the flora of Dinosaur National Park. He has collected plants for many years in the American West, Southwest and Midwest as well as in Alaska, Japan, Siberia, Taiwan, Mexico, Austria, Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Germany and Poland.

Steve is a member of the International Association for Plant Taxonomy, the American Society of Plant Taxonomists, Society of Systematic Biology, Botanical Society of America, California Botanical Society, and the Colorado Native Plant Society where he was vice-president.

In his spare time, Steve likes to backpack, take nature photographs, and play and write music. They say he's a pretty good guitar player and is a co-founder of the Natural Ax Band in Cedar Falls, Iowa.